Rabbit Holes
Pick a rabbit hole.
Self-contained explorations, one concept at a time. Interactive where the topic earns it (live mempool, real difficulty countdowns, actual unit converters). Sourced everywhere. Fall down a hole, come out understanding something well.
Live
Bitcoin Units
BTC, sats, mBTC, uBTC, Finney. Which unit to use, when, and why there are so many of them.
✓The Supply Schedule
21 million, forever. Here's how the math works, and why it can't change.
✓Halvings
Every 210,000 blocks, the new-Bitcoin tap halves. Why, when, and what happens after.
✓Mining
Hash, nonce, target. The simplest hard problem in the world, and why it secures $T.
✓Key Space
2^256. A number so large the universe doesn't have enough atoms to brute-force one.
✓UTXOs
Bitcoin does not have balances. It has UTXOs. Once you see them, you can not unsee them.
✓The Mempool
Where transactions wait before they are real. The auction-house buffer between you and a block.
✓Seed Backup Strategies
Twelve words is your wallet. Lose them and you lose your bitcoin. Here is how serious people back them up.
✓The Inflation Bug Postmortem
August 15, 2010: someone created 184 billion BTC out of thin air. Five hours later, it was fixed. Here is the full story.
✓Lightning Routing
The Lightning Network is a graph. Sending a payment is finding a path through it. Here is how routing actually works.
✓Decentralization
What 'decentralized' actually means, where Bitcoin sits on the spectrum, and how the network has defeated takeover attempts without anyone in charge.
✓Quantum and Bitcoin
Quantum is the FUD claim that comes up most often after fiat-debasement and energy. The honest version: the threat is real, the timeline is slow, the fix is governance, and Bitcoin has agency.
✓Bitcoin and Energy
Energy is the FUD claim that comes up most often, full stop. The honest version: the consumption is real, the comparisons are rhetorical, the demand profile is unique, and the fix for what is actually broken is already profitable.
✓Mt. Gox to FTX: The Custody Graveyard
A decade of crypto custodians that lost their customers' coins, from Mt. Gox to FTX, and the honest case for holding your own keys instead.
✓The Block Size War
The 2015-2017 fight over Bitcoin's block size limit, from Bitcoin XT to the UASF to the forks that split away, and how it settled who actually controls the rules.
✓The BIP Process
How an idea becomes a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, what the editors actually control, why most proposals die, and how the ones that matter get activated - including the covenant activation fight underway in 2026.
✓Privacy on Bitcoin: What Works and What Doesn't
Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. How chain analysis actually traces coins, where your real name attaches to the ledger, what the 2024 CoinJoin shutdowns changed, and the defenses that still work.
✓How Taproot Actually Works
One key, two doors. How a Taproot output is built, why every one looks the same until it is spent, what Schnorr signatures changed, what Tapscript left open for the future, and what has actually been done with it since 2021, inscriptions included.
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